






























“GETTYSBURG,” 

> 

‘AS WE MEN ON THE RIGHT SAW IT.” 

n A PAPER 

READ BEFORE THE 

OHIO COMMANDERY 


-OF THE- 

/Ailit&py OpgRp of Royal Region, 

-OF THE-- 

UNITED STATES, 

—-BY- 

GEORGE A. SHAyfiR, 

Late Caftain 2d Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. 


May 5 th, 1886. 


CINCINNATI. 

H. C. SHERICK & CO. 
1886 . 


e.o f j Z. 



















*> 


4 
















» 




IN EXCHANGE 

JAN 5 - 1015 

\ 










GETTYSBURG, 

AS WE MEN ON THE RIGHT SAW IT. 


In the beginning of June, 1863, Slocum’s 12th 
Corps of the Army of the Potomac, to which the 2d 
Massachusetts Infantry belonged, was awaiting events 
upon the barren hills of Stafford Court-House in Vir¬ 
ginia. We had come to this region in the previous 
December, when it was covered with woods, broken 
by an occasional clearing of—for the most part—worn- 
out tobacco fields. Under the winter’s demand for 
house timber and fuel the trees had disappeared as 
far as the eye could reach; the fields, where they had 
not been beaten hard by parade and drill, showed the 
neglect of cultivation which attends the neighborhood 
of a hostile army, and had no interest as landscape. 
The Court town was a shadow of a village, without 
trade or society. We were glad to bid it all good-bye 
as we went to Chancellorsville in the last of April; 
but in ten days we were back again to waste a month 
of invaluable campaigning weather. 

The sound of cannonading near Fredericksburg, 
ten miles away, was a not unwelcome break upon 
this tedium. It set loose the tongue of rumor, that 
imaginative dame whose wild inventions were not 
confined to the ear of the newspaper correspondent, 



— 4 — 


but afforded food for strange plans of campaigns 
marked out and fought in the knots which gathered 
in regimental tents of rank and file. 

Then came a sudden summons of a few picked in¬ 
fantry regiments to join a scouting party with Pleasan¬ 
ton’s Cavalry. Then a few days more of quiet and 
ennui , when at sundown of Saturday, June 13th, the 
corps was hurriedly set in motion northward. In grand 
strategy the foot soldier, even though he be an officer, 
is but a pawn upon the chess-board, moved hither 
and thither by an incomprehensible master. He con¬ 
tents himself, therefore, while history is being organ¬ 
ized, with reflections upon his personal comfort or 
inconveniences of body and mind; and that all-night 
march comes back to my memory as an exasperating 
race which might perfectly well have been postponed 
to daylight, over worn-out corduroy roads, whose 
projecting log ends tripped up the sleepy men; whose 
holes jolted the wagons into ditches, whence all 
hands must lift them, and which were very apt to be 
altogether wanting when straggling creeks or marshy 
places disposed us to be most lenient toward their 
general shortcomings. But what seemed to us a 
nefarious plot of some evil-disposed officer to harass 
helpless footmen was but an inevitable feature of a 
hurried movement of Hooker’s army to intercept an 
invasion of the North by Lee. That heavy firing at 
the Falmouth crossing of the Rappahannock was a 
feint of Hooker’s, made to learn the meaning of the 
ominous quiet in the Fredericksburg intrenchments, 
and the cavalry and infantry battle of Beverly Ford, 
in which the picked regiments had met the Confed¬ 
erate, Steuart, was another phase of the same inves- 


— 5 — 


tigation, both of which showed that Lee was gathering 
his resources for an offensive campaign through that 
ever-available gateway to Maryland or Northern 
Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley. 

On that Saturday whose evening set us on foot to 
Dumfries, Lee’s advance, under Ewell, had invested 
the Union General, Milroy, at Winchester, well down 
the Shenandoah Valley, and on the morrow the larger 
part of Milroy’s command, some 4,000 men, were 
captives to the enemy, and the passage into Maryland 
was open. The rest of Lee’s forces were following 
hard upon Ewell, but their movements were so 
closely veiled behind the Blue Ridge that the Army 
of the Potomac was,for the most of June, groping in the 
dark, uncertain whether its opponent would emerge 
through the mountain gaps into the Manassas plain, 
or would try once more the tempting farming country 
ofSouthern Maryland. Hence our movements seemed 
fitful and capricious to those of us whose business it 
was to obey orders. To-day we were hastening 
breathlessly forward; to-morrow we lingered by the 
roadside, or in the fields. The latter days of June 
found my fragment of the army at Leesburg, near 
Edwards’ Ferry, on the Potomac. It was a restful 
picture upon which we looked from the lordly hill 
to whose keeping, with some old field works of rebel 
construction, my regiment was assigned. A pretty 
village, in whose yards we saw roses as we passed, 
and which the breath of war had apparently touched 
but lightly, if at all, with church spires from which 
issued on our single Sunday’s stay the tones of bells 
on whose wings our home-sick souls were straight¬ 
way carried to New England; wide-stretching green 


— 6 — 


fields, with an occasional grazing cow which had 
marvelously escaped the forager, as if for the purpose 
of preserving a pastoral completeness to the land¬ 
scape ; even the groups of tents seemed to belong there, 
and only the distant sound of a cavalry battle around 
Upperville, a dozen miles to the westward, on that 
Sunday afternoon, reminded us of the dreadful busi¬ 
ness which brought us here. Happiness is the result 
of contrasts, and we remembered that the day of our 
arrival had been one of misery. We had marched 
through torrid summer heat and stifling dust; we had 
waded Goose Creek in default of a bridge, and a fierce 
tempest of rain and hail had completed our soaking 
as we issued from the stream; we had bivouacked in 
our drenched garments without blankets, with small 
and ineffectual fires, and in the face of the searching 
wind which usually follows thunder storms. So it 
was pleasant to be physically comfortable, even under 
the trifling inconvenience of having our baggage so 
far away that changes of underclothes were out of the 
question, as they continued to be for some three 
weeks. 

While we lingered here, Lee boldly determined 
the course of the summer campaign. 

On Monday, the 22d of June, Ewell’s two divis¬ 
ions crossed into Maryland at the Sharpsburg and 
Williamsport fords; and a week later, the rear guard, 
under Longstreet, passed the river at the same points. 
As soon as tidings of these movements reached 
Hooker, he marched his army over Edwards’ Ferry, 
and we were once more upon loyal soil. What a 
superior world it seemed to our not too prejudiced 
eyes! 


— 7 — 


The season was one of perfect foliage. Heavy 
and frequent rains had fallen, to the great disturbance, 
indeed, of the farmers; for the wheat fields were ready 
for the reaper, and already the grain was begin¬ 
ning to be lodged in tangled masses. But our un¬ 
commercial eyes beheld only the freshness of the 
many tinted fields, the roads free from dust, which 
wound through picturesque landscapes, and the trim 
houses, and huge and well-filled barns. Cherries 
were ripe; we could vary our dry army diet with bread 
and butter from the hands of house-wives; our insin¬ 
uating foragers persuaded the thrifty farmer folks— 
who, in the midst of their glow of gratitude at our 
intervention betwixt their hearthstones and the cruel 
invader, were never unwilling to turn an honest 
penny—to bring forth hidden delicacies; in the phrase 
of a Confederate raider, “we had a right smart of 
apple butter, and a right smart of cow butter;” and 
as we approached the villages which had been en¬ 
tered by the enemy’s scouting parties, the voluntary 
donations of edibles lavished upon us in welcome of 
our timely appearance were almost beyond our 
capacity to appropriate. 

To both the inhabitants and the soldiers the march 
was a festival. 

The prodigious length of our wagon trains filled 
the country people with amazement. 

The ranks of troops tramping in unbroken proces¬ 
sion from morning to night seemed to have drained 
ttie North of men. And we, well fed, marching at 
leisure, and looking everywhere upon friendly and 
hospitable faces, felt for the time as if we were only 
in the pageantry of war, its perils wholly past. 


— 8 — 


In my diary of the second day’s march after pass¬ 
ing the river, there is mention of tedious delays, which 
kept us upon our feet—before reaching the night’s 
bivouac—until nine or ten in the evening. The 
causes of that delay, as has since transpired, were 
momentous in changing the plan of the campaign, 
and in assigning to the Union army a new commander 
at that most critical juncture—the eve of a battle. 
When Hooker learned that all of Lee’s army had 
passed into the Cumberland Valley of Maryland, he 
proposed to the Washington authorities to move 
Slocum’s corps up the left bank of the Potomac to the 
Sharpsburg ford—by Antletam battle ground-—and, 
upon his way, take the garrison of Harper’s Ferry, 
some 12,000 men under French—leaving Maryland 
Heights unoccupied—and thus throw a strong force 
across Lee's communications with Virginia, capturing 
his pontoons, intercepting his reinforcements of am¬ 
munition as well as the herds of cattle and other 
supplies on their way South from pillaged Northern 
farms, and so pressing upon the Confederate rear 
guard as it advanced into Pennsylvania that the 
invaders would be forced to turn and make fight 
wherever the Union General chose to take position. 
The various corps of the Army of the Potomac were 
within easy supporting distance of such a movement, 
and Hooker,- confident of its feasibility, accompanied 
Slocum’s column to Knoxville, within three miles of 
Harper’s Ferry. But there he received a message 
from Gen. Halleck that French’s garrison must not 
be taken away. In vain did he urge that the troops 
were useless there under the present or any probable 
disposition of the enemy’s forces; in vain he set forth 


— 9 — 


the importance of saving the loyal States from the 
devastation of war; in vain he met the terrors, with 
which the Washington people were constantly filled, 
lest the army should leave their city uncovered to 
the enemy’s assault, by the plea that a vigorous 
aggressive movement upon Lee’s rear would be the 
most effective of parries against the Confederate thrust 
upon the capital. Hooker’s requests were peremp¬ 
torily refused, and under such an exhibition of obvious 
lack of confidence in his fitness to deal with the 
emergency of the invasion he asked to be relieved of 
the command of the arm}/. 

The 12th Corps turned its back upon Harper’s 
Ferry, and moved, with the rest of the army, north¬ 
eastward toward Frederick. As we bivouacked at 
this city we heard that Meade had succeeded Hooker 
as commander of the Army of the Potomac. And it 
may be mentioned incidentally, as throwing some 
light upon the motives for thwarting Hooker’s well- 
conceived plan, that Meade was straightway granted 
permission to do as he would with the Harper’s Ferry 
garrison, and was also placed in command of the 
scattered detachments distributed through Maryland, 
which, under divers pretexts, had been kept from 
Hooker’s control. 

Two features of our march through Frederick 
come to me with vivid impression, viz., the enthu¬ 
siasm of the people as we passed through their streets 
with such cheering and displays of the American 
flag as our men had not witnessed since the days 
when the}/ marched from home; and the general 
drunkenness of the army. I know nothing of the 
sobriety of the officers; certainly those of my ac- 


- LO - 


quaintance had too much anxiety to get their men 
safely out of the town to stop for any hilarity. But 
abundant whisky, sold on every hand despite the vigi¬ 
lance of the provost guard, thrust upon the men by 
well-meaning citizens, put into the midst of our com¬ 
panies as we marched, and drank before we could 
break the bottles, which we did most promptly and 
inexorably, threatened a general demoralization of the 
rank and file, and did leave hundreds of them within 
my limited observation reeling in the streets, lying 
in the ruts in perilous proximity to artillery wheels, 
or snoring by the roadsides far beyond the town. 

In the nice calculations which have been lately 
made as to the causes which served to deplete Meade’s 
forces from that preponderance over Lee’s numbers 
which the ordinary muster returns show, to about an 
equality with the Confederate forces, I have never 
heard that the disabilities of the Frederick drunken¬ 
ness have ever been taken into account. Yet I am 
sure many men missed the fighting on account of 
their debauch. 

We were sauntering slowly through Littlestown 
on the morning of Wednesday, July ist; we halted in 
mid-forenoon at the group of houses called Two 
Taverns, five miles southeast of Gettysburg, and ate 
our dinners leisurely. The sound of guns must have 
been largely cut off from our ears by intervening 
hills, for it was afternoon before the artillery became 
so demonstrative as to demand our presence. But, 
as we now know, Buford’s cavalry had met the ad¬ 
vance of the Confederate General, Hill, at io o’clock, 
a mile and a half northeast of the town of Gettysburg. 
He had been speedily reinforced by Reynold’s ist 


— II — 


Corps, this commander being killed almost as soon 
as he entered the fight; at i p. m. Howard had brought 
up the nth Corps to meet the swelling numbers of 
the enemy, from the first largely superior to the Union 
forces; at 4 p. m. the day’s battle was practically done. 
The 1st Corps had been worn out, the nth Corps 
had been crushed and driven pell-mell through the 
streets of Gettysburg;* of the 16,000 Union troops 
engaged through the day scarcely 5,000 remained in 
condition to rally about a brigade of Steinwehr’s divi¬ 
sion which held the abrupt height upon the southern 
edge of the town, since known to fame as Cemetery 
Hill. These alarming facts came to us in fragments as 
we pushed towards the firing. Groups of frightened 
women and children, on their way to safe shelter, met 
us with imploring eyes; men hurrying away with 
their household goods in carts reported disaster to 
our army, and the death of Reynolds; now and then 
a hospitable array of refreshments in a farmer’s yard 
showed the superiority of the host to personal fears 
in his sympathy with the soldiers, whose heads the 
July sun was fiercely smiting; and the white bursts 
of smoke high in the air came closer, and the double 
explosion of cannon and shell was more nearly sim¬ 
ultaneous. 

The 12th Corps was now moving upon the Balti¬ 
more turnpike, which ran directty over the crest of 
Cemetery Hill, the highway to the Nation’s capital, 
the point of the most strategic importance in the 

* Ames’ brigade was the last of the nth Corps to fall back, and did not 
share the panic of some of its associate regiments. The second brigade of 
Steinwehr’s division of the same corps, under Col. Orland Smith, held Ceme¬ 
tery Hill from the time of Howard’s arrival upon the field, and was not 
engaged in Wednesday’s battle. 



— 12 - 


battle field, the army’s roadway of retreat. Two miles 
from the town the skirmish line was formed, and 
Williams’ ist Division felt its way slowly to the right 
and front of where the battle had been, while Geary’s 
2d Division went away to the left. It is but little that 
a line officer knows of the topography of the fields he 
hurriedly traverses. Hills and woods quite invariably 
shut from his view the operations of other than his 
own regiment or brigade; and as his positions change 
from hour to hour, he is apt to retain in mind only a 
confused impression of rocks, trees, and fences not 
much unlike their kind everywhere. Yet as it seemed 
then so it would now, if I were to be dropped among 
the woody hills southeast of the cemetery. We were 
in a place capitally suited to sturdy defensive warfare, 
for the wide-stretching woods were of goodly sized 
trees, and quite free from underbrush, while every¬ 
where large bowlders cropped out of the soil. This 
formation characterized both the right and left flanks 
of Gettysburg battle field. On the left the two Round 
Tops were wooded from base to summit, and thickly 
beset with ledge, bowlder, and shingle. On the right, 
Wolf’s, McAllister’s, and Culp’s Hills were some¬ 
what less ragged with rocks; but the forest with 
which they were covered in 1863 formed a curtain of 
some two miles or more in length—not, however, very 
broad. Through this curtain our division took a peep 
on Wednesday afternoon to see if we were not wanted 
upon the right flank of the nth Corps, which would 
have placed us upon the cultivated open ground of 
Benner’s Hill by the eastern outskirts of the town. 
But the fighting was over for the day, and where we 
hoped to take position the enemy were already in 


— 13 - 


occupation. Hence we withdrew from Wolf’s Hill 
and the Hanover road, and, after a night’s bivouac 
near the Baltimore pike, we advanced in the early 
morning, to the stern music of some measured artil¬ 
lery dueling in our front—whose resonant ring was 
practically our first assurance that we were to take 
part in a pitched battle betwixt the two great armies— 
to the southerly slope of Culp’s Hill, overlooking 
Rock Creek, and with the sweet waters of Spangler’s 
spring a few yards behind us. 

The configuration of the battle field has been often 
described. A line drawn from the town of Gettys¬ 
burg nearly due south for the distance of two and a 
half miles would pass through Cemetery Hill and 
the entire formation of the left center to its termina¬ 
tion in the Round Tops. Cemetery Hill, which is at 
the edge of the town, was the strategic center of the 
field. From here, bending pretty abruptly to the 
southeast, ran the right of the battle line for the dis¬ 
tance of a mile, over East Cemetery Hill and Culp’s 
Hill to the base of McAllister’s and Wolf’s Hills, 
which are practically one, all of the heights averaging 
some four or five hundred feet above the sea level. 

Before the men who were on Cemetery Hill lay 
the town, and at right and left a broad cultivated 
valley, suitable for cavalry operations—a use to which 
Buford put it on Wednesday afternoon in dela}fing 
the Confederate pursuit—upon whose yonder slope, a 
mile or more away, were the Confederate lines, 
except those of one division, which were in the streets 
of the town. 

The only protection of this central part of the 
Union line were the stone walls and rail fences, with 


—14 — 


perhaps a very slight earthwork thrown about the 
cannon which were posted here Wednesday noon. 
The spade was an unknown tool in most of the 
Gettysburg lines. 

The Culp’s Hill troops, consisting of the reunited 
divisions of the 12th Corps under Ruger and Geary 
(Williams being in temporary command of the corps, 
and Slocum of the right wing of the army), were 
among woods and rocks, with the sluggish waters of 
Rock Creek—for the most part a narrow shallow 
stream, although near my brigade deep—at the base 
of our hill towards the enemy. Woods were thick 
before us. Behind us, at a few hundred yards dis¬ 
tance, was the Baltimore turnpike, about which were 
clustered, out of reach of the guns, the wagon trains 
and some of the hospitals. Far across the country, 
through orchards and over undulating fields, we could 
catch glimpses of troops and guns in position. The 
inner distance from right to left was some two miles. 

The day was dreadfully still, save for some inter¬ 
mittent shelling in attempts to find out what the 
enemy was doing. As the morning mists broke away 
it became clear and hot, uncomfortable for them 
who were in the open fields. But we were upon the 
picnic grounds of Gettysburg; the oaks a grateful 
tent above our heads, as they had been over genera¬ 
tions of pleasure groups; the pellucid waters of the 
spring refreshingly cool. We made our ground 
strong with breastworks of logs and stones. It was 
not till four in the afternoon that the battle broke 
behind us at the left. In the hurry of establishing 
the long lines, Sickles’ 3d Corps was thrust three- 
quarters of a mile in advance of its true position; and 


— !5 — 


upon Sickles, and involving Hancock’s 2d Corps at 
his right, and Sykes’ 5th Corps at little Round Top, 
Longstreet made strenuous assaults, whose furious 
reverberation and roar lasted for three or four hours, 
the crash of musketry, apart from the artillery, sound¬ 
ing like incessant peals of thunder. Our ears served 
as witnesses of the drift of the battle; for steadily the 
noise came nearer, and the Southern yell could be 
more and more distinctly heard. So critical was the 
case that, in order to reinforce the left, Meade stripped 
his lines wherever it seemed safe to do so, and with 
us the safety border was overpassed, for all but one 
brigade of the 12th Corps was hurried across the 
fields, arriving to find that, happily, the assault had 
spent its force. In this movement one of Geary’s 
brigades* wandered somewhere southward, out of 
reach of the enemy, and was useless for the emer¬ 
gency at the left, as well as for its old post at Culp’s 
Hill, where it was sorely needed. But a single brigade 
held the half mile or so of Culp’s Hill intrenchments 
on Thursday evening, that of Gen. George S. Green, 
—emphatically the hero of the right wing of Gettys¬ 
burg—his troops five New York regiments. It was 
in Lee’s plan of battle to attack our right with Ewell’s 
corps simultaneously with Longstreet’s assault upon 
the left, while some of Hill’s divisions carried East 
Cemetery Hill. Thus, at the hour when the right wing 
was being stripped, a series-of determined attacks was 
begun there which came seriously near success; 
whose complete success, with disaster to our position, 
was probably prevented only by the fall of darkness. 


* Kane’s brigade. 



— 16 — 


The assailants of Greene were Edward Johnson’s 
division of four brigades. 

Neither combatant could make any use of artillery, 
a fact which served the advantage of Greene, whose 
defenses were made almost impregnable against 
infantry assault by the massive rocks bestrewed all 
along his line, betwixt which he piled a wall of lesser 
bowlders and tree trunks. Yet it required nerve, 
vigilance, and good generalship for this slender line 
of defenders to steadfastly withstand, for two or three 
hours, the impetuous charge of fourfold their numbers. 

So far as he occupied the hill, Greene held it 
firmly. But the intrenchments vacated by our brigade 
were entered without hindrance by the Confederate 
brigade of Steuart, who was thus upon Greene’s 
flank, which, however, was specially guarded by a 
solid traverse. In daylight Steuart’s position was 
within full view of the Baltimore turnpike. Between 
nine and ten o’clock in the evening the 12th Corps 
came back to its post. With our ears intent upon 
the ♦battle to which we were hurrying in the after¬ 
noon, we had heard none of the tumult of Ewell’s 
attack. But as we drew near to our place rumor 
hinted to us that all was not as it should be. The 2d 
Regiment sent forward a reconnoitering company, 
which quickly struck traces of foreign occupancy, but 
our incredulous Colonel was not satisfied till another 
venture was made. How pokerish it seemed to wait 
amid the darkness and the dead silence for revelations 
of a danger, most formidable because mysterious. 
But it was probable that the enemy was as scared as 
we; for one of our reconnoitering company’s officers 
commanded the surrender of a group of pickets upon 


— i7 — 


whom he stumbled, and came marching them out, to 
the number of a dozen or more; but then followed a 
command of “Fire” from the bushes, and a furious 
volley flew over our heads. 

Fortunate was it for the Union army that Ewell 
did not fully know the significance of his lodgment 
within our lines. The undisturbed march of a few 
more yards would have set him directly across the 
turnpike, taking in reverse Culp’s and Cemetery Hills, 
the whole of the Union right and center; and the 
story of Gettysburg might not perhaps have been 
that which history now records. The night was our 
salvation. In direct continuation of the Culp’s ridge, 
separated from it by a meadow a hundred yards wide, 
is another wooded acclivity, a part of McAllister’s 
Hill. To that hill our brigade retreated, and there, 
taking Steuart in flank and rear, we built other breast¬ 
works of logs and rails. Ewell’s position was not a 
strong one for his aggressive movements. He had 
no place for artillery; the only guns he had tried to 
bring to bear, stationed in the open ground of Benner’s 
Hill, having been quickly silenced on Thursday. 

From day-break — about four o’clock- on Friday 
morning, till seven, three or four of our batteries 
swept the valley of Rock Creek, where Ewell lay, 
with terrific fire. Slocum had increased the Union 
strength to eight brigades—six of the 12th Corps, and 
two from the 6th Corps. Stirred up by the artillery, 
Ewell’s men, increased to seven brigades, fiercely 
resumed the assault, their sole available points of at¬ 
tack being the rocky stronghold against which they had 
vainly surged the night before. Until eleven o’clock 
—for seven hours—the terrific crash of musketry 


i8 — 


resounded through the woods; and after years have 
shown,in the death of nearly all of the trees which came 
within the range of fire, how continuous the sheets of 
bullets were in the course of that struggle, at which 
we, upon its outside, listened with dreadful suspense. 

Yet not listened only. Two regiments of our brigade 
—the 2d Massachusetts and the 27th Indiana—have 
borne witness, by memorial stones erected in the 
edge of the meadow which divides Culp’s from Mc¬ 
Allister’s, to the fatality whiph took from their ranks 
nearly half their men in a gallant but mad and com¬ 
paratively fruitless charge over that meadow, soaked 
with the rivulet which trickles from Spangler’s spring. 
Some one had blundered. Slocum requested Ruger 
to try the enemy at this portion of the line, and, if 
practicable, force him out. By the time the order 
issued from the mouth of Col. Colgrove, of the 27'th 
Indiana, in temporary command, it became “Advance 
two regiments immediately, and dislodge the enemy 
from his works! ” What two regiments of six hun¬ 
dred men could essay against a brigade safely hidden 
in strong defenses these regiments attempted. But 
only one passed the meadow, the 2d Massachusetts. 
The 27th Indiana, Colgrove’s own regiment, in a 
broader stretch of the meadow, was stopped midway 
in its course. The 2d touched the enemy’s works,fought 
there for many minutes—would have stayed there if 
there had been any thought of reinforcements—but 
the enemy, recovering from his surprise, was already 
sending out his skirmishers to intercept our retreat, 
and that part of our brigade left behind us could not 
fire without endangering us; so, without disorder, we 
turned about and took the nearest and least exposed 


— T 9 


course to our hill-side, where, under shelter of a wall, 
we made it hot for our opponents. That this charge 
was not without its influence, at least in showing the 
enenty that all his paths of advance towards the turn¬ 
pike were hemmed in, may be true.* But it was hard 
to persuade the survivors of the regiment that the waste 
of valor and life was not utterly disproportionate to 
the effect upon the morning’s battle; for the assault 
was made at seven o’clock, and the roar of combat 
went on unbroken till eleven. Then Ewell was 
driven back. He left in the hands of the 12th Corps 
some 500 prisoners, while the losses in killed and 
wounded were enormous. The dead and mangled 
lay thick everywhere in the woods,but especially were 
they clustered around Spangler’s spring. One dying 
Virginian bore plaintive tribute that men who could 
kill one another at the post of duty could be brothers 
in the hour of pain. “You uns have been right kind 
to we uns,” he said, as, with difficulty, he gulped the 
cup of cold water brought to him from the spring, 
from whence it has been said the enemies drank in 
truce even while the fight was raging. 

To this spot, after the battle, came some curious 
spectators from the neighboring country to learn 
what war was like. To us, who were hardened to 
such things, the effluvia and the distorted bodies, 
swollen to blackness under the blazing sun, were 
becoming most intolerable to every sensibility. It 
required a very brief experience to divest these sight- 

* Extract from the report of the Confederate, Edward Johnson: “A dem¬ 
onstration in force was made upon my left and rear. The 2d Virginia Regi¬ 
ment and Smith’s brigade of Early’s division were disposed to meet and 
check it, which was accomplished to my entire satisfaction.” 



— 20 — 


seers of desire to be more familiar with a battle field. 
A few glances, and faces became deadly pale, as one 
faltered, “ Come, Bill, we have had enough of this! ” 

The culminating assault of the battle, it is well 
known, was made at the point occupied by Hancock’s 
2d Corps at some distance to the left of Cemetery 
Hill, on Friday afternoon. With Ewell’s repulse an 
ominous silence fell upon the field everywhere for 
two hours. Then burst what we then could only 
compare to a tornado of shells and solid shot. Lee 
directed the fire of one hundred and thirty-eight guns 
upon our lines, the chief of this discharge falling upon 
the center. The fire was often in volleys by battery, 
and was most appalling to us who received only the 
shots which fell beyond their mark. In the thick of 
the storm as many as six shells in a second are said 
at times to have burst, and horses seemed to share 
the consternation with men. I have recollections of 
the appearance of here and there an orderly flying 
across the open ground upon some indispensable 
errand, with something of the attitude ascribed in 
pictures to people who are trying to run from a vol¬ 
canic eruption; but whoever could find cover of a 
stout tree or a huge rock clung to it with determina¬ 
tion, and prayed heartily that it might not fall upon 
him, as it seemed as if everything must tumble upon 
our heads. 

From my lookout I could see a battery in the left 
center, standing out against the sky. It was my 
index of the effect of the cannonading upon the 
stability of our lines. So long as it stood fast and 
delivered its fire, I felt somewhat at ease. But once 
or twice it was relieved, or its caissons were sent to 


— 21 — 


the rear for ammunition, and at such times it appeared 
as if the break had been made, and the sauve qui 
pent - save himself who can—was to be next. But 
its post was not abandoned, and the battle was not 
lost. 

We could not see the infantry action which fol¬ 
lowed at three o’clock; that imposing advance across 
a mile of open field, with occasional halts to tear 
down fences, of the 14,000 Confederates, who, before 
they came in contact with Hancock, were reduced to 
Pickett’s noble band of 4,500—the steel lance head, to 
which it has been compared, of a shaft of softer fiber. 
The crash, long prolonged; the shouts, as much 
Yankee as rebel; then the diminution to pattering shots, 
and the Union hurrah outlasting the Confederate yell, 
and closing the drama; these came to us to give us 
somewhat more of assurance than of fear, and then 
followed more of comparative stillness. Whether or 
not we were to have another day of this terrific strain, 
nobody knew. We slept soundly enough at night, 
but how nervous we were is shown by an episode of 
my night’s duty as officer of the guard. Some time 
after midnight one or two musket shots were exploded 
upon our picket front. In an instant the whole brigade 
was upon its feet, and without orders blazed furiously 
into the darkness. It was many minutes before dis¬ 
cipline could be long enough asserted to show that 
there were no signs of any enemy in our front. It 
may be that the shots which provoked our uproar 
were a feint of the enemy’s withdrawing pickets, for , 
at eight o’clock on Saturday morning our reconnois- 
sance, as far as the York road leading northeast from 
the town, discovered only the debris of battle; dead 


22- 


men, dead horses, and exploded caissons, where our 
batteries had silenced the hostile guns; abandoned 
wagons, leveled fences, dwellings in whose yards 
were bloody clouts; desolation where four days ago 
were the thrift and beauty of rich farms. 

For two days we staid upon the field to bury our 
dead, and to await the reports of scouting parties as 
to Lee’s movements. On Sunday afternoon our faces 
were set once more towards Virginia. 










4 ,. . »• 



















< 








i 












I 









r 








































































































